Subj : Re: Is well written code a rare species ? To : comp.programming From : Randy Howard Date : Fri Aug 12 2005 09:24 pm Anonymous George wrote (in article ): > Is bad programming common practice ? Yes. There is far more bad than good, unfortunately. Get used to it. It's a good thing for you, the more of it out there, and the better you are at eradicating it, the more employable you are. > Is well written code a rare species ? Outside of the best run shops, yes. > I ask this, because I want to know if I should change > myself or if I should just go to another employer. If your employer realizes you are 'doing the right thing' and willing to reward you for it, then you should be happy. > My current job is driving me crazy, because it takes so much > effort to do even the simplest modification to the application. If they are really that bad, convince your boss to spend the energy rewriting them. Otherwise suck it up. Unless you could paid differently for different types of coding, what difference does it make? > And how can I learn during a job interview whether the company's > product has high quality source code ? You can't. You might be able to ask (if they let you interview with the right techies instead of managers and HR flunkies) about their coding standards and how they ensure code quality, but it's rare to get satisfying answers in an interview to such questions. If you want true happiness and you don't like maintaining other people's code (which is almost always different somehow from how you like it done, hence frustrating), then interview for positions doing new code development and make it clear you don't want maintenance programming. -- Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR) .